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Amy Winehouse

The next entry in my series on this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Documentary feature is Amy, a well-crafted film that is like watching a beautiful Rolls Royce crash in slow motion.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably old enough to remember the meteoric rise to stardom that Amy Winehouse experienced, which makes watching this movie so surreal. It can seem like it was so long ago, when in reality it’s only been a little over a decade since her album Back to Black threw her into the global spotlight.

And it was that spotlight that killed her.

Amy is, put very simply, a movie about a troubled but extremely talented young woman with personal demons that were made infinitely worse by the pressures of stardom. You can’t come away from this movie without thinking that if only a few things had been different – if she had gotten treatment earlier or she didn’t get married or if her father hadn’t been her manager – that Amy would still be alive today. And that’s the true tragedy that this movie reveals. We all know how it ends, but it’s very sobering to see how many times it could’ve ended so differently.

The film tells the story of Amy’s life from the beginning, through a remarkable amount of video footage that spans years. It really seems like there was a documentary of her life being filmed since she was a teenager. We’ve lived in a digital age with ever-present cameras for a long time now, but no other film really drives that fact home like Amy. We get to see her grow from a plucky teenager to a worn out adult through camcorder and phone footage that is flawlessly edited together with professional shots and paparazzi snaps. The end result is as eerie as it is effective.

Music drove Amy’s life, and it drives this movie too. From her young days starting with a small label, to her explosive rise to the top of the global charts, we follow Amy as she writes her lyrics based on whatever is happening in her life at the time. All of her songs are about relationships: with her friends, with her family, with her boyfriend (and later husband), and even her relationship with drugs and alcohol. This film cleverly and carefully puts the song lyrics into the context of the story we’re seeing unfold on the screen, and that technique goes a long way towards giving us a very intimate and revealing picture of who Amy was and what her art meant to her.

But the art soon takes a back seat to the drama, and it’s almost painful to watch the last third of this film. As we witness Amy’s long battle with bulimia, drug/alcohol addiction, and a destructive relationship with her enabling husband, the story becomes less about her amazing musical talent and more about problems that could have been fixed with more consistent and stern guidance in Amy’s life. You do definitely see some of that in the movie, as record executives, Amy’s friends, and even therapists try to put her on the right path. But, as is mentioned in a very early part of the movie, Amy was the kind of person who desperately needed someone to tell her no. Her parents were never those people in her childhood, and not quite in her adulthood either.

Nobody really comes out looking good in this movie. Amy’s father comes off as a greedy opportunist, her former husband looks like an enabling self-interested d-bag, her mother comes off as loving but completely ineffectual, and Amy herself appears incapable of maturing past being the petulant young lady whose parents couldn’t control her.

But, most of all, it’s people like us that come out looking the worst. As I saw the paparazzi descend on Amy like vultures time and time again, as I watched late night talk show hosts make fun of her in front of millions, as I watched and remembered the entire world turning against this poor woman who clearly needed help, I couldn’t help but feel that we were all complicit in this. So often in our quest for idols, we lift our stars up to heaven and then tear them down and bury them when they don’t live up to our lofty ideals; offering no help or solace, just judgement. Amy shows us the other side of that experience, and it’s never flattering.